Walking Back In With Nobody Watching

Twenty two years of this, and the thing he has noticed lately is not the absence itself. It is that the absence has become the loudest feature.

He does a thing. What it is does not matter and he would rather it did not, and it is real and useful and small and he does it properly and nobody sees any of it. Not out of neglect. There is no audience in the structure of the thing. There was never going to be one and he knew that when he started and he chose it and he would choose it again.

Which is the part that makes this worth writing about, because he is not a man who wants to be seen. He has been offered visible versions of what he does, twice, and turned both down, and he was right both times and knows it.

So this is not a complaint and it is not a request.

Here is the actual phenomenon. In the early years the absence of an audience was simply a fact about the arrangement, like the hours or the location. Somewhere in the last five or six years it has stopped being a background fact and become foreground. It is the thing he notices first about Tuesday. Not the work. The nobody.

He has not become bitter and he has watched carefully for that. It is more like a hum that used to be inaudible and is now the note he hears when he stops.

He is fifty seven, and he goes back in tomorrow, and he will go back in on Wednesday.

What he would like is not an audience, which he does not want and has twice refused. He would like the hum to be something other than the loudest thing in the room. He would like, if there is such a thing, for the going back in to be toward something rather than merely into something.

You will have your own hum. The absence that used to be a background fact and has moved to the front.

The psalm about people on a road

There is a psalm written about pilgrims, people walking a long way to Jerusalem, and there is a line in the middle of it that describes what happens on the road rather than at the destination.

They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.Psalm 84:7

From strength to strength. That is not a description of somebody who started strong. It is a description of a road on which a walker is somehow further along in strength at each stage than at the last, which is not how walking works and is the whole point of the line.

And then the second half, which is the one for a man at fifty seven. Each one appears before God. Not: they arrive at a city. Not: they receive something. They appear before God, which is a description of a face rather than of a prize.

So take it plainly: you are on a road toward a face rather than into a room, and that is what Psalm 84 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a pilgrim song and lays it down on an ordinary Tuesday twenty two years in.

Which is exactly what he asked for and could barely put words to. He said he would like the going back in to be toward something rather than merely into something. The psalm gives him a road with a direction on it, and what is at the end of the direction is not described as a place and is not described as a reward, and I am not going to describe it either. It is somebody's face.

You have been on a road rather than in a loop, because the written word puts a going before God at the end of it and calls the walking a going from strength to strength, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man who has been hearing a hum.

And the hum itself, which is what he actually came with. Notice the psalm says each one. It is a plural road with a singular arrival: everybody on it, each one appearing. Which means the absence of anybody watching him is not the absence of anybody on the road. The road is full of people who are not looking at each other, all of them walking, and being unobserved by them is not the same as being alone with them.

You have been unobserved rather than alone, and Scripture is what makes that distinction rather than my saying so, and His Spirit is the one who makes an unobserved road feel populated.

What this article will not offer him

Now the guardrail, at the end of a site that has to be trusted on exactly this.

Nobody is going to describe what is at the end. Psalm 84 does not, and the moment anybody paints a picture there they are inventing furniture, and a man who has turned down two visible versions of his work would spot that instantly.

And nobody is going to tell him the twenty two years are producing something in him. They are not a refining process, and this site does not turn a man's life into a mechanism with him in the middle of it.

And nobody is going to shrink the hum by pointing forward. It has been getting louder for five or six years and that is the size it is, and naming what is ahead is not a way of making today quieter.

And the years are not accruing anywhere. There is no account. The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else and then thrown down, and nobody in that scene is being paid for Tuesdays.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with whether anybody is looking, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing ahead of you to earn, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps a Tuesday from becoming an installment.